. archaeologist william sanders. the economy of any given human group, any culture, is a powerful factor that affects the rest of that culture -- the social organization, the political institutions, even the ideology, the religion of a people. from my perspective, the economy of a group is one of the most powerful determinants of human behavior. keach: to archaeologists, all economies fall somewhere on a spectrum from simple to complex. in a simple economy, people grow or gather all the food they eat. they make all the things they use. households in such simple economies are almost completely self-sufficient. at the other end of the spectrum are highly complex economies in which people specialize in one particular job, like these shoe salesmen in morocco. specialization means people are no longer self-sufficient, but depend on each other. the shoe salesmen are dependent on the shoemakers, and the shoemakers are dependent on the tanners, and so on. this dependence on others makes society in general more complex, so specialization is a measure of society's overall complexity. archaeologist
